Students at Presentation Academy are forbidden to write love letters

Students at Presentation Academy are forbidden to write love letters, a disciplinary rule that makes Fermina Daza’s secret correspondence an offense punishable by expulsion. Its enforcement exposes a relationship her father had not known about, separates Fermina from her aunt, and gives a private act of writing consequences that reach far beyond the classroom.

Rule and Enforcement

The Academy’s prohibition is enforced by Sister Franca de la Luz, its superior. Entering a class on Ideas of Cosmogony stealthily, she watches the students over their shoulders and discovers that Fermina is pretending to take notes while writing a love letter. Under the Academy’s rules, the discovery is sufficient cause for expulsion. The violation is therefore not simply a matter of romantic feeling: it becomes a formal disciplinary case through surveillance and institutional judgment.

The Investigation and Expulsion

Summoned urgently to the rectory, Lorenzo Daza learns that his strict control of his daughter has been breached. Fermina admits writing the letter but refuses to identify her sweetheart. She maintains that refusal before the Tribunal of the Order, which confirms the expulsion. The Academy’s process can punish the visible act, but it cannot compel Fermina to surrender the name she is protecting.

Consequences Beyond the Academy

The expulsion prompts Lorenzo to search Fermina’s room, a sanctuary he had not previously entered. In a false bottom of her trunk, he finds packets containing three years of letters. Their signature identifies Florentino Ariza, but Lorenzo cannot accept that his daughter knows little about her lover beyond his work as a telegraph operator and his love of the violin. His discovery turns the school’s enforcement into a family crisis: the correspondence reveals a relationship, while Fermina’s silence frustrates her father’s effort to define it on his terms.

Lorenzo also blames his sister for enabling the relationship and sends her away without allowing an excuse or appeal. Fermina’s expulsion thus accompanies the punishment of Aunt Escolástica, whom Fermina has always associated with the mother she barely remembers. In response, Fermina locks herself in her room and refuses food and drink. The rule’s effects extend from the Academy’s verdict into the household, reshaping Fermina’s bond with her father and severing her from a trusted source of support.

Significance

The episode shows how an institutional ban on love letters can reach beyond the intended offense. The Academy identifies and punishes a written act; Lorenzo’s search makes its concealed contents legible to him; and his response imposes further costs on both women. Yet the enforcement does not produce Fermina’s compliance: she withholds her lover’s identity before the tribunal, and the discovery of the letters instead marks a decisive rupture in her father’s authority over her.